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snydeq writes "With so many threats to a free and open Internet, sooner or later, people will need to arm themselves for the fight, writes Deep End's Paul Venezia. 'If the baboons succeed in constraining speech and information flow on the broader Internet, the new Internet will emerge quickly. For an analogy, consider the iPhone and the efforts of a few smart hackers who have allowed anyone to jailbreak an iPhone with only a small downloaded app and a few minutes,' Venezia writes. 'All that scenario would require would be a way to wrap up existing technologies into a nice, easily-installed package available through any number of methods. Picture the harrowing future of rampant Internet take-downs and censorship, and then picture a single installer that runs under Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux that installs tor, tools to leverage alternative DNS servers, anonymizing proxies, and even private VPN services. A few clicks of the mouse, and suddenly that machine would be able to access sites "banned" through general means.'"

"Upon request", as you say. "Courts". Ie. within a legal framework, subject to rights, seizure and eventually your own compliance.

The danger we are trying to avert, is the disappearance of the need for those things. Of course the evildoers can always get a death squad or a court order - but they cannot automatically spy on everyone and aggregate the results, nor keep us from doing and saying what we want.

I am just not a fan of trusting either. Especially not the lawmakers - as they are a single point of failure, and easily (and already) bought.

I would rather live in a world where any and all regimes (however legitimate, fair, corrupt or not they may be) will need to secure me, my cooperation and my property before they can listen in on my conversations, check what I do on my computer or strip away my anonymity.

Perhaps more to the point, it has been abundantly demonstrated that your average user doesn't have the slightest ability to distinguish between a trojan and a legitimate application(to be fair, most 'geeks' aren't too much better off, in terms of technical analysis; but at least they sometimes know where to go for advice).

Court orders are boring and sometimes require public disclosure to get. Spamming the internet with dozens of variants of "PHUCK the MAN Anon-t00lk1t l33t.exe" and "Ultimate untraceable

True, but irrelevant. First, caching aside, how many people store their communications? The courts can't force you to do something you can't do. Second, the endpoints are (currently, typically) not encrypted anyway. Third, under SOPA it's not illegal to access the sites, just for DNS to return their IP and for Google (and who?) to list them in search results.

The biggest hurdle is that Tor sucks and most people won't want to use their bandwidth to act as a router for anonymous traffic.

The biggest problem with TOR is: how do you know you're really anonymous? How do you know where DNS really pointed you when you downloaded that exe from torproject.org? How do you know what 0-days you've hit while browsing that pwnnd your browser, even without js or flash? (And there have been TOR vulnerabilities.) How do you know what you're *really* running?

There doesn't seem to be any way to rely on a technological meansure to protect you from a corrupt government - too much firepower stacked against

I was just about to make the very same point myself. It's called Perfect Forward Secrecy [wikipedia.org]. Use protocols in which the users do not have the ability to decrypt content after the session ends. Courts can't require you to do the impossible.

Yes, they can. And no matter how much you try to prove you can't, they can still charge you for noncompliance to their orders. It's called contempt of court, and the judge can make you rot in a cell until you do comply. No jury, no bail, no nothing.

There is no requirement that I know of for a judge to listen to expert witnesses on a contempt charge. It's not part or party of the case the judge is hearing. Contempt of court comes into play during a trial for something else. It's how a judge forces testimony out of a witness that refuses to testify. Ignore a subpoena, get hit with contempt of court. Wanna sit on the witness stand and go to sleep instead of testifying? Contempt of court. Refuse to give evidence in an ongoing trial? Contempt of co

Yes, they can. And no matter how much you try to prove you can't, they can still charge you for noncompliance to their orders. It's called contempt of court, and the judge can make you rot in a cell until you do comply. No jury, no bail, no nothing.

Ummm, contempt of court charges can be appealed. It happens all the time.

I've been experimenting with a few commodity routers (that can support open-wrt or dd-wrt) for just such a purpose. Do you have any good references? I'm envisioning some roof-top and tree-mounted self-contained set of router/repeaters than can run off a small battery and solar charger...

I seem to remember there was some slashdot story with just this premise. I can't seem to find it though...

I think this would a be a great "internet alternative" but nowhere near robust as the current internet. We would need to find a way where the average user (e.g. some dumb fool) to connect to it and get the information they want.

However, I don't see legit businesses (e.g. banks, stores, etc) using this.

It's not so much a technological problem as it is a social one. It's not a question of whether you can bypass the blocks or not, it's more a question of whether you're willing to suffer the consequences if you get CAUGHT with illegal bypass/proxy/VPN software. Many people are willing to TALK freedom, a much smaller number are willing to get the shit kicked out of them by a cop or get thrown into jail or prison for a few years for actually EXERCISING it.

open wifi + new p2p internet protocol with no dependence on any existing internet infrastructure or dns (no encryption required)

much more difficult to control if there's no obvious target

all it would take is an app for android and iphone that turns the phone into a wifi repeater, as well as a browser that uses a new protocol (developed by whoever makes the app first, but i would suggest simpler than the existing tiered tcp)

gateways to the internet could be through translator software (also from any

I don't trust private owners, and I don't trust the government. I'm undecided which one I trust least. Cooperatives don't really scale well. The best option I see is to make it technologically difficult for whoever controls the tubes to abuse their power: If all the data is encrypted, and they can't decrypt it, what can they do? Worst they might achieve would be blocking by address, but that's a modest level of evil compared to what they could do if the data were not encrypted.

Really? There are at least a handful of large, well run coops out there. Ocean Spray cranberries is the one that comes immediately to mind since they are local to where I grew up. $1.4 billion in sales might not equal Google's revenue, but it does show that large cooperatives can thrive.

That is very true but the problem is the general populace doesn't give a shit. As long as they have access to FaceBook, Twitter, etc. they remain clueless on what virtual freedom means. They are too busy watching the Super Bow going apeshit over juvenile humor as nipplegate.

It is only the geeks that see the laws out of sync with the "moral compass" of society. Even an idiot can see that it absurd that you can't copy / share a number -- yet this is precisely what the laws says you can't do! Share a number which is a representation of reality (audio, video, text, algorithm) because somebody has asserted their "copyright" -- people don't want to talk about digital ownership being an artificial right based on the false belief of "scarcity."

People won't do something -- change the laws -- until they perceive somebody else's "rights" are stopping their privileges. Until then, a small majority will keep on exercising their civil disobedience by ignoring copyright.

"It is only the geeks that see the laws out of sync with the "moral compass" of society."

As a geek, allow me to say "Bwahahahahahahahahaha!!"

"Even an idiot can see that it absurd.... false belief of "scarcity.""

That is nowhere near as deep or as true as you think it is.

You have wrapped yourself in geek arrogance, which may or may not be deserved, and believe that it elevates your opinion to fact. It does not. There are a number of geeks on/. who do not believe as you do and I'll warrant are your intellectual equal without problem.

Well said. Unfortunately, the lot who are busy beating the broken drum of scarcity are making it difficult for the rest of us who are honestly interested in fair laws around IP.

Should IP be protected? Absolutely. I like that people get paid to be creative and provide me with entertainment. If we don't protect it and pay the people who created it (and yes, when necessary, distributed it), then we'll not have it anymore. To do that, the laws have to, and had to, change. And those laws must be enforced.

I like that people get paid to be creative and provide me with entertainment.

The problem is the 20 industry goons standing in between you and the content creator taking their cut.

As for the lawmakers, they're not really convinced of the shit they say as regards copyright and IP laws. For the most part they're just reading off of a script that comes with a 6 figure check stapled to it. It wasn't until massive opposition by their constituents and the threat of repercussion that they started backing away from it, and that was political self-preservation, not any belief that the people were right. How many legislators have even come out and said "The people don't want this, and they are justified"? No, it's all "We must reexamine this bill" or "We must craft it in a way that protects copyright blah blah", never "Yeah, you're right, on closer inspection the bill was a fucking joke." They're stuck between a rock and a hard place because on one hand you've got people like Chris Dodd saying "Don’t ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk and then don’t pay any attention to me when my job is at stake" [techspot.com] while their constituents are threatening to kick their ass out of office in the next election cycle if they jump on board with SOPA/PIPA.

But there are sufficient loopholes here that would allow innocent sites to be shut down, thereby a loss of jobs. Have we answered the question dealing with national security? And as well are we recognizing the value of the First Amendment?"

Those are the remarks he was so "bored" by. Given that, how the hell can we reasonably expect that these people have even thought about the shit they are doing? The few people actually doing real thinking in the comedy of errors we call congress get routinely ignored and dismissed. They've already decided how they're going to vote before the bill even gets entered. They've been paid to vote a certain way by the same fucking people writing these damn bills. They don't even want expert testimony, they didn't even want to allow anyone in the way of an expert to speak in opposition at the damn hearing. Google gave great testimony as to the problems with SOPA [house.gov] and were themselves dismissed, just as any opposing lawmaker was. I can't find the link to the exact quote, but one of them (I think it was Mike Leahy (D-Vermont) said something along the lines of "I don't see how this will break DNS and I don't believe any expert that says it will". This is what they're being paid for by the pro-SOPA groups, after all.

The only other thing I can think of, that maybe they have thought about it and are just too fucking stupid to see the problems with what they were proposing horrifies me even more.

All in all, I think convincing lawmakers is a fools errand. There are some people trying to pool money to lobby against the media cartels, but fighting bribery with bribery doesn't seem prudent to me. Better to just make their stupid laws as ineffectual as possible. Eventually they're going to get to the point where we really are living in an honest to god Orwellian Police State and the people are just going to overthrow the government entirely. I'm not entirely convinced that we could even prevent it at this point.

stamp a logo on a piece of fashion, or make the logo fashionable, and BOOM!, you're in the pockets of the local legislators.

look at louis vuitton et al. thanks to them there's big scary posters all over the airports in europe, and they're more concerned with searching you for faked brands than drugs, biosecurity risks or weapons. shit, they probably only ask you to take your boots off so they can check that they're legit.

the big fashion companies make their cash off trademarks, certainly not the (usually

It's not the ones and zeros but the data they represent—they're just an encoding. There are lots of codecs, each with its own set of variables, so that even one photo will have an indefinite number of different possible 1/0 strings which can represent it. We have copyright to help the 'author' recover the cost of time and effort to arrange the bits/photons/molecules into something that interests us, not just to get a particular representative bit string into your hands.

I understand and to some degree agree with your point. However, the primary concern leading various entities to try to restrict the use of the internet is with people distributing copies, whether for free or for money, not with people making copies. If you make a copy and keep it to yourself, the internet is probably not involved.

I do know that some IP "owners" have a desire to keep you from even making copies for yourself, but that's another issue altogether, and one on which my opinions are less conflicte

People go where the content is. If The Pirate Bay were only accessible over the Tor network there would be tons more traffic there, thus more information on how to access it.
If enough content were only accessible over Tor soon there would be extensions for web browsers that would make it as easy to get there as any other site.

As a darknet I2P is clearly superior to Tor, both in speed and security - Tor still relies on trusted directory servers while I2P is fully distributed and requires no trusted servers of any kind. Tor is better as an anonymizing proxy.

The way I see it, accessibility loss is just a precursor to connectivity loss. When ACTA fails to stop piracy what do you think they're going to do next? It's not two separate problems, just two degrees of the same problem.

I would go further and suggest that this is a desired outcome by both governments and content holders: to drive the subversives, the perceived anarchists, and in short, all of the non-mainstream consumer users of the Internet off of it into their own "underground". This keeps the nominal Internet "market" sanitized from both subversive content and disruptive behavior, as well as segregates the undesirables into their own sandbox where keeping an eye on them may not be easier, but lowers the degree of urgency for doing so.

I feel really sorry for my FBI "guardian angel". Must be really boring.

In other news, "The Government" is well known to be incompetent, so does that make me safe from their interference with my evil plots?

I get equal amusement from listening to people who believe "The Government" is either all powerful or all powerless. It's just people, doing whatever they think their job entails, or sometimes trying to enrich or empower themselves in more or less ethical ways. Or just hanging on until retirement. Or in th

I can see this tightening of regulation creating an all new internet that is build amongst non-profit communities and connected together in fashions so that no one owns the transmission means. Unlike today's internet which is essentially owned by oligarchy consisting of AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon (i.e. Big Telecom) communities may end up either laying their own transmission lines or use multipoint wireless. This might just be the tipping point at which the pricing and collusion of Big Telecom leads to their ultimate demise and irrelevance.

ISP's should be forced to either A) sell their infrastructure business to the people or a single private entity (government, which sucks from a privacy standpoint) or B) split off to a separate corporate entity (privacy might be better but competition is difficult when there is limited physical ways to connect and multiple suppliers; one supplier seems a better option) so that their infrastructure cannot be leveraged as part of their services package and all companies are on fair footing when it comes to ba

...but in all seriousness: okay, Mr. Venezia, you can jailbreak it. Just be careful you don't brick it. No one needs a bricked Internet. While you're at it, can you install a SIM unlock, too? I hear the service provider that the Internet comes with is terrible.

...that is what Moglen et al have been saying all along: don't trust the lawmakers and people in power to make you free. Guarantee your freedoms one by one, by building them - free speech, anonymity, etc. can be engineered!

No it doesn't. The whole point of TOR is that the only way to determine who is doing what is for the nodes to collude with one another (although there are traffic analysis attacks that ISPs can do if they can see all the traffic through all the nodes).

The other problem is that people might stop creating these great sites/services because you can't "just browse" to them or venture capitalists won't fund the startup. Anonymity and an underground internet is useless if all the cool stuff is just taken down (as opposed to blocked) or even worse, never created in the first place. For example, can we secretly get to megaupload now? What about it's competitors that have disabled file sharing?

If someone shoplifts from or even just robs your store, then the government can shut down your store.

I don't think that analogy is entirely accurate. It would be something more along the lines of if someone goes into your store and starts advertising goods that they have stolen from another store, and you don't do anything about it, then the government can shut down your store.

ie, filled with errors, out of sequence, dropped and maybe even faked packets (I know, that goes beyond what UDP is supposed to do).

but assume that the network is evil and fake and someone is always trying to do bad things (listen, change, realtime trap-on, etc) and write your layered app protocols on top of THAT assumption.

its a good assumption, in fact. if you assume your transport is bad and your app fills the gap to make the end to end connection, *now*, reliable and trustable, then you can deal with both honest and less-than-honest physical and logical transports (ethernet, atm, cable, dsl, etc).

the problem is that our protocols and apps have assumed no mess-ups internally in our networks. this is no longer true anymore! the evil bastards have gotton a hint of how cool our internet toy is and they want to pervert it to suit their will.

if we don't start taking a defensive posture on our network, we will LOSE control (arguable we have already) of our networks.

Picture the harrowing future of rampant Internet take-downs and censorship, and then picture a single installer that runs under Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux that installs tor, tools to leverage alternative DNS servers, anonymizing proxies, and even private VPN services. A few clicks of the mouse, and suddenly that machine would be able to access sites "banned" through general means.'"

Kind of breath-taking when you contemplate it.

Given that the "War on Sharing" is just getting started and will follow th

The problem with this approach is that it focuses on the end user's connectivity and not the effect such laws would have on the web sites themselves. Who cares if you have unfettered access to all sites when the sites don't exist due to legal threats.

Let's take Slashdot as an example. Say something like SOPA/PIPA/ACTA/etc eventually succeeds and it becomes very easy to shut down any website with just a suggestion of copyright infringement on the site. That is, if somebody posted a link to The Pirate Bay in the comments, then somebody else could get Slashdot as a whole effectively shut down as a result. And yes, that's what could happen with laws such as SOPA.

What do you think happens to sites like Slashdot in an environment like this? The only reasonable response would be to drastically limit, if not eliminate, all user comments.

Meanwhile, the Slashdot user deftly installs the circumvention software and is easily able to get to Slashdot... but who cares? Without the comments, the entire site has only marginal value.

That's why circumvention software is only a tiny part of a workaround and one that will eventually fail. It's the sites that need to be protected, not the access.

... aren't in home desktop machines or laptops. They're in 4GWhatever smartphones. Those are what's being pushed now. Your nifty installer might work on a desktop or laptop or even one of the few surviving netbooks, but let's see it work on a smartphone and still have plenty of storage space to do useful stuff with. And be prepared to pay out the ass for your data plan.

And what you gonna do with that pirated data you do manage to download onto your home machine? What's to stop antivirus makers from ad

And yet we have people running covert operations to let corn rot and then distill the runoffs. They have to hideout in the woods to perform one of the simplest operations you can do with fire and liquid. The laws are justified and sold, claiming that they protect people from bad alcohol, when we all know it is about tax revenue.

In 1914, the federal government went on record outlawing a weed that covered the banks of the Potomac. A huge cadre of policemen have since been converted to an army to prevent people from talking stupid and getting the munchies. The claim is that marijuana is a "gateway" drug, when we all know that the taxed alcohol the authorities allow is the real gateway drug.

Anyone that calls these regimes into question is labeled with an outlaw, rebel, or some other less than "proper society" title. Any politician that claims that it is a matter of personal liberty is called "bat shit crazy" when they aren't being completely ignored.

Why, oh why, would anyone think that the powers that be would allow an alternative internet? "If you're on the alternative internet, it must be because of child pornography!!! Or you might be a terrorist! THINK OF THE CHILDREN!" The excuse to bust down doors to lock people up for talking in chatrooms is prepared already, and the people have been conditioned to swallow it already.

Add to that all the photos you take, maybe your home videos too and it's easy to get up to a TB - or more. Buy yourself a PVR that records HD content and even 2TB fills up pretty quick if you don't keep on top of cleaning up content after you've watched it.

Maybe your post should be updated to: If it weren't for video, the hard drive industry would be a lot smaller.

What he said. Photos alone runs into several hundred gigabytes and I've only been into photography a few years, and only started shooting RAW relatively recently. With terabytes of storage affordable, I'm now keeping high-quality video from events that I wouldn't have been able to keep before.

The *AA's have declared war on the free internet, and governments everywhere are getting on board with that after seeing the Arab Spring use its tools to overthrow their governments and generally stop doing what they're told. We saw with the SOPA protest how effective we can be when we work together, because there are vastly more of us than there are of them.

What we need to do now is to take it to the next level and take the fight to them. Revising copyright is probably a good place to start because there is a greater degree of public awareness about it now. If we push for the complete abolition of the notion of copyright, and push very hard, then the *AA's will be put on the defensive.

More generally we need to expunge government of the clueless, supine creatures who lay down for all this nonsense as well as the pure evil who are screwing us with full awareness of the damage they're doing. With the advent of additive manufacturing this same set of issues is about to spread to every industry, and it's going to intensify with those larger stakes. We can see a new era of human freedom or unprecedented repression, but we won't tilt the balance in our favor unless we all fight hard.

Even saying they're "uncomfortable with the Internet" is to drink the Koolaide. The long-term and repeated historical trend has been that they're uncomfortable with sales, and this time the threat that people will shove more money down their gullets than the Hollywood companies can handle, is just as grave, and they are fighting it just as tenaciously.

Part of me wants to say there's one difference, which is that this time they are winning and achieving the goal of lowering their revenue -- driving people t

The internet now threatens the world's government-corporations and so of course, attempts will be made to curtail it. This will inevitably result in a "pirate" internet similar to "pirate" radio. Servers will be set up offshore, on satellites, over the borders and in the woods, on thousands of buildings and in the powerlines. Underground transmission, actually a very old technology, will make a comeback (http://www.cellular-news.com/story/18682.php). Pirate internetworks will shift and bob and weave and nev

Darkneting won't save us. They can deep packet inspect, or block service to TOR nodes, or simply disconnect anyone who tries. They can - will- turn the internet very quickly into an old fashioned telephone system, with your real name required and full tracking on at all times. Bandwidth throttling, for instance, while ostensibly to stop "hogs" and kill Netflix, is very useful to discourage people from running TOR nodes. Hard to run encrypted virtual pipes when they constrict at will.

They can pass any law they like and criminalize any trick we can come up with. The spooks behind this are not uninformed, and read the same boards we do.

Young people, 30 and below in age, are not concerned. They have never, if you think about it, lived in a free world. They laid face-down on the hallway floors in high school while giant thugs let dogs sniff their crotches, looking for drugs like aspirin and Dayquil. They have been fingerprinted, watched, recorded, and monitored to the point where their school-issued laptops were taking pictures of them in their underwear for years. They have never lived in a world where such things are insane; this is everyday life to them. As they grew up, they have to give pee tests, saliva tests, stop for random searches by cops, swear to moral turpitude, sign up to homeowner and condo associations that pretty much are prison systems with nicer plumbing, and submit every movement on the internet and in person to GPS/IP-registerd locations. They don't understand why privacy is important; they are indoctrinated by the sheer banality of the evil. People who live by sewage filtration plants don't smell the shit, and young people don't smell the loss of their liberties.

Solutions have to be hardware based combined with newer communication tech. Simple WiFi with encryption won't work; they'll make it illegal.

Ideas: go to LEDs in a tube to transmit optical signals over short distances, home to home, building to building. Infrared lasers to act as backbones to a TOR-like network that does-not-interface with the old internet. The old internet is dead, people; they commercialized it, gave to the corporations and the police states of the world.

Wild ideas: finally solve the problem of radio interference- it is a hardware/software limitation, not a real one. Thousands can transmit and receive over a single frequency if we solve this riddle, and then bandwidth is effectively infinite enough that TOR-like radio mesh networks could actually work with low latency and high throughput, with encryption.

3-D printing of custom network nodes that do not conform to the government's ideas of MAC addresses and complete surveillance. We'll need our own custom 3-D printers as well; they will easily require mass-produced printers to ID themselves in the products.

Well out there ideas: Quantum entanglement as a communications method. Don't laugh too hard; think about it. A transmission system that doesn't actually transmit through the air, but instead transmits at a distance without any detectable means. It can be done; I'm not the genius to do it. Believe it that the military will do it if it can be done. We all can do it too.

Are people so dumb now they can't pick from three or four installers the one appropriate to their system?!

No; it's just that you've made the same ignorant mistake that many folks here on/. seem to: assuming that the majority of internet users are technically educated.

FYI, it's not 1993 anymore; thanks to commercialization and social networking, everyone from your mailman to your granny are accessing the internet these days. Many internet users are specialized in non technical fields, such as nursing or architecture. Your statement is akin to a doctor saying, "If you're too dumb to perform gastrointestinal surgery on yourself, why should I bother doing it for you?"

Yes, there are many, many people online these days who have little to no idea how the internet works, outside the knowledge that typing "www.google.com" will take them to Google's search page. Maybe if you tried educating the noobs, instead of responding to their ignorance with your own, you wouldn't find them so loathsome.

Yes agree, tor + freenet + GPG etc. are the basis for something useful. However 'they' own the pipes and country to country gateways, for example. So the new, new thing will really be from the bottom up and may be quite retro to start with. I've been looking backwards at fidonet, packet radio and gopher, for example. Also been thinking about biomimetic systems where the keys, for example are transmitted on one medium and the 'doors' on another, via something that spectrum hops.

This sounds very tinfoil hat stuff but I've been around servers since Prestel, Minitel in France, BBS systems with modems and the current outlook just seems pretty bad. That is intuition rather than science, but really doesn't feel good at all. Even if we 'keep' the internet, it becomes something worse than television.

I'd say this bundle is unnecessary for most GNU/Linux users (we have package managers) but still handy if we need to quickly deploy anonymizing software in a public machine.

It's better to use the bundle. Information is leaky, and you can easily forget to toggle some obscure configuration option and blow your cover. If anything, browser fingerprinting [eff.org] is an excellent reason to use the bundle. Everyone using the bundle should have the same fingerprint, so your identity is more obscure than if you used your

For everyone to use encryption, it needs to be made so easy that they don't even need to know what encryption is. Like with SSL - all people need to know is that if their banking site doesn't show a padlock icon, something is suspicious. That probably means accepting 'good enough' encryption for a lot of things - encryption that could be broken by a fairly advanced MITM attack, but which is sufficiently annoying to the evesdropper so as to render mass-monitoring impractical.

Not risk isn't just (or even primarily) censorship by the government directly. It's corporations.

However, I think that you're simply wrong about motivations. The desire to pirate isn't even in the top 5 reasons for most people who are paying attention to this stuff, and not in the top 10 for the toolmakers he's talking about.

That said, I wouldn't be shocked if it was a common reason for people to actually use the tools. All the more reason to find a solution to the "piracy problem" that doesn't involve dest

as much as corporations talk the talk about free markets, they all want to be a monopoly. they all want 100% market capitalization.

yes, we're free to choose between several walled gardens, and a precious few open platforms. give the corporations their way, and the shiniest, sexiest walled garden would become monopoly, and there'd be just as much control as you'd get from a censor-happy government.

governments and corporations all want control, but for different reasons.

We disagree. I think that corporations present a greater threat than the government. With the government, we at least have the constitution and some sort of influence over how it behaves. Not enough, but some. With corporations we have none. And nearly everything we do is in a corporation's control at some point or another.

I have an iPhone. It comes with a user agreement that specifics how I can use the phone. If I don't like it, I can get another phone and/or another provider.

I don't have to have an iPhone. I don't have to use AT&T.

In the US, your choices of providers is extremely limited -- is it three nowadays? The smaller ones simply resell the service of the larger ones so they don't count. You can get another phone, sure, but when they are all behaving in the same fashion -- as they do -- then this choice is illusory.

And you do have to use AT&T. If you use the internet or telephone service of any sort, the odds are overwhelming that AT&T is handling your communication as some point in its travels, even if you aren't their direct customer.

Using tools to get around restrictions set up by the government (as in China, etc) is NOT the same thing as getting around restrictions placed on a device by the manufacture.

I think they're exactly the same thing.

I think I see where we differ. You see a difference between corporations and government. I think that they have effectively merged and there is little functional difference, except that corporations operate with far fewer safeguards. Corporations do the things that are illegal for the government, and vice versa, but they work hand in hand. The end result is the loss of liberty overall.

Your first sentence made me spit water on my monitor laughing. Pray tell, WHO are these "intelligent" and "well-informed" people? the politicians have proven that they know squat about the internet while boasting their knowledge of it. The corporations seem intent on crippling a thing that has massively increased their profits.